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Airbus Faces Charges Over 2009 Rio-Paris Crash
mayberry42 writes "A French judge filed preliminary manslaughter charges Thursday against Airbus over the 2009 crash of an Air France jet — opening a rare criminal investigation against a corporate powerhouse. The order from Judge Sylvie Zimmerman targeting the European planemaker centers on the June 2009 crash into the Atlantic of an Airbus A330 bound for Paris from Rio de Janeiro, killing all 228 people on board."
First, it is not. French law is Napoleonic law and it is extremely strict on the concept of "innocent until proven guilty". The Blair style playing fast and lose with it and declaring all management guilty until proven innocent in an H&S case as per UK H&S legislation is impossible there. No comment who exactly sponsored Blair to push that one.
Second, for the time being the charge is mostly a formality. This allows resources to continue to be allocated to the case. Otherwise it would have had to go on the cold case shelf. This way the French government can subsidize the search for the black boxes without getting into the usual Boeing vs Airbus or Air France vs the rest of the world subsidies debate. Granted the money in this case is 20-30M so it is a fraction of the usual sums discussed in the context of Airbus or Air France subsidies, but it is money none the less. Additionally, there are resources you cannot buy officially with money like military vessel involvement. This allows these resources to continue being allocated to the case.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
This issue has nothing to do with fly-by-wire or glass cockpits, it has everything to do with false and misleading information being presented while the aircrew is in a situation where they cannot easily determine that said information is false, nor determine the correct information.
Take for example Birgenair Flight 301, a Boeing 757 (which is non-FBW, non-glass cockpit - a traditionly controlled aircraft in every sense of the word) - during a routine wash before the flight took off, a ground crew member taped over the pitot static ports to prevent damage. However, he never removed the tape before handing the aircraft over to the air crew, and they never spotted it during their preflight walk.
The aircraft took off, but it wasnt untila couple of minutes into the flight that the errors in the information compounded themselves, resulting in errant readings being presented to both the pilots and the autopilot - the autopilot eventually gave up and disconnected, and the pilots could not orientated themselves even when presented with obviously wrong information (their airspeed indicators gave a speed of 200 KIAS and falling, even with increased application of throttle).
5 minutes into the flight, the aircraft crashed into the sea.
The flight was a night flight - the aircrew had no external points of reference to fix on, and thus could not orientate themselves as to the correct pitch, yaw or speed of the aircraft. They were essentially doomed once they took off.
This Airbus crash is very similar - a pitot static system with known flaws (already identified by Airbus and due to be changed out by Air France) failed at a time when the aircrew had no external reference points (they were in a dense storm front, they had no horizon or other reference points) and the computer systems gave up.
Note that even with Airbus aircraft, the computers can be overridden - and they themselves know when they are talking bollocks, and will regress into various modes of flight control assistance. One of the messages given out by the aircraft over the maintenance link was that the aircraft systems had regressed into Direct Law - or in other words, the computers took themselves out of the decision making process and started acting as a direct messenger between the control inputs by the pilots and the flight surfaces.
Your "Boeings system is trusted and Airbuses is not" is common fud and bullshit in the aviation industry and the aviation enthusiast following - its not absolutely no basis in fact and Airbuses control system can fail safe in just the same way as Boeings - the difference is that in standard control law (Normal Law), Airbus provides several flight protection measures, including alpha protection, bank protection and airframe stress protection. Boeing also provide these, but to a lesser extent - however, both systems can either fail back to or be deliberately put into a direct stick-to-surface control mode.
This is common objection to flight envelope protection systems. People's gut reaction is that in an emergency, they'd rather be in total control than have some computer "interfering" with them. But the statistics are on the other side: Pilot error is more common than computer error.
China Airlines Flight 006 is a prime example. They had a mechanical failure, and while the flight crew was distracted, the plane ended up in an ugly dive. They pulled it out after exceeding 5 Gs, badly damaging the airframe, and losing a considerable amount of altitude. Manual-control advocates say this is a good example of why you don't want a computer imposing limits on you - they had to do drastic things to save the plane. I disagree - if they were flying an Airbus, the computer would have prevented the situation from ever occurring.
The second argument in favor of flight envelope protection is that it actually enables the pilot to push the plane harder in an emergency. Consider this scenario: you're landing in low visibility, still a good ways out. Everything looks fine, but as you break out of the clouds, holy crap there's a skyscraper. You have a split second to evade it. With mechanical controls, you have to roll hard, but not *too* hard, or you'll ( break the plane | spin | exceed max angle of attack | etc). In a modern Airbus, you slam the stick over, and the plane will roll as fast as it can within its mechanical limits. Perhaps that's not as fast as an experienced military pilot could in a familiar plane which they regularly take to its limits, but a commercial pilot probably hasn't been over 2 Gs in a while, and in that split-second emergency, the computer will let them fly it harder than they ever could on their own.
So it's time for a car analogy. I have two cars I drive regularly: one has antilock brakes; the other does not. The mechanical limits are similar: light cars, good sticky tires, brake pads with plenty of bite, etc. On a good day, my stopping distance is similar between them, +/- a meter. But I've been put in emergency deer-avoidance situations with both cars on multiple occasions. In the ABS car, that means stomp on the brakes, burn off as much speed as possible in a straight line, and swerve at the last minute once the deer's finally decided which way to dart. In the non-ABS car, I'm pretty good at braking on the track, but both times it's been for a deer, my response was the same: ease into it, feeling where the limit is; crap locked up a wheel, let go for a moment and ease back into it to try to get just shy of the limit again; and occasionally letting off to steer early, because my ability to manage my grip budget is too taxed to get it perfectly right at the last minute. I haven't hit a deer yet - but that's only because I drive the non-ABS car slower.
The difference is very noticeable: when taken by surprise, the computer can stop faster than I can, AND it lets me focus on the situation instead of the limits of the machine. I believe the same is true for flight control systems, and statistics agree: they prevent more accidents due to pilot error than they cause due to computer malfunction. Note that there's not much difference between Airbus and Boeing these days, but Airbus pulled ahead in safety until Boeing started equipping their planes with flight envelope protection systems. Both brands are considerably safer than they were in the full-manual days.